PDF What are Strengths based Practices all About?

What are Strengths based Practices all About?

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What are Strengths based Practices all About?

Venkat Pulla

Charles Sturt University, Australia

When people used to offer to join Mother Teresa in her work with the needy of Calcutta, she would often respond: ``Find your own Calcutta.''

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road; the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path.....

--Antonio Machado (1979)

ABSTRACT

Strengths Based Practices (SBPs) concentrates on the inherent strengths of individuals, families groups and organisations deploying peoples' personal strengths to aid their recovery and empowerment. SBPs are empowering alternatives to traditional methods with individuals, group or organizational work. SBPs refrain from allowing crippling, labeling and stigmatized language. Descriptions and pathology owned by persons groups and organizations that suggest acceptance of their condition as hopeless or helpless to change are constructively challenged through SBPs. Strengths based strategies build and foster hope from within by focusing and working with precedent successes. SBPs strategies facilitate change by assisting to look at/what has worked? What does not work? And what might work presently making it important for facilitators and those desiring change to be integral to this process of change. This introductory paper provides a bird's eye view of the assumptions, and discuses its core elements

Keywords: Resilience, Strengths Based Practice, Strengths Approach, Social Work.

INTRODUCTION

In tune with the `Positivity Wave'(s) that are currently sweeping the planet, several exciting and new approaches are being forwarded in all practices that involve human interactions. `Strength based practice in simple terms present approaches that promote resilience as opposed to dealing with deficits' (Pulla V., 2006). Strength based practices are gaining impetus globally in diverse fields of human services management, health

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Papers in Strength Based Practice

care, education and training reminding that all environments have resources and that in every society individuals, and institutions are willing to assist each other to cause human wellbeing. The principles of caring and caretaking, nurturing and ensuring that members of our society and our organisations in turn become resilient and hopeful is clearly within the scope of strengths approaches.

There is something very inward looking about this practice. Teachers in the schools are seriously considering how best to make their students understand what they really want them to understand. HRD Managers have started thinking about strength based performance appraisal while dealing with their employees. Community groups in Asia and the Pacific region have been dealing with self-reliance and indigenous development for several decades. Some of these self reliance experiences can be tweaked to reflect in strength based practice' (Pulla V., 2006).

Strengths Based Practices (SBPs) concentrates on the inherent strengths of individuals, families groups and organisations deploying peoples' personal strengths to aid their recovery and empowerment. SBPs are empowering alternatives to traditional methods with individuals, group or organizational work. SBPs refrain from allowing crippling, labeling and stigmatized language. Descriptions and pathology owned by persons groups and organizations that suggest acceptance of their condition as hopeless or helpless to change are constructively challenged through SBPs. Strengths based strategies build and foster hope from within by focusing and working with precedent successes. SBPs strategies facilitate change by assisting to look at/what has worked? What does not work? And what might work presently making it important for facilitators and those desiring change to be integral to this process of change.

In 2006, the author of this paper launched the first international conference on strengths based practice in India, the land of Gandhi (Pulla, V, 2006, pp. 120?126). The core values of Gandhian way of development have been being fair and respectful to all, focusing on strengths, assisting a self directed transformation to bring forward changes that are meaningful and significant to people and to reflect on how they want their situation to be ( Pulla, V., 2006). Gandhian mantra may sound a shade simplistic description of what is being canvassed as strengths approach today, but the core elements that he deployed in the context of communities and ensuring sea change in the fabric of Indian society undoubtedly provides the fundamental context for community engagement practice in the western world today.

It is a tribute to Gandhi that he applied only positive thoughts and positive strategies across a wide range of social institutions including the British raj that had India and several other colonies in its grip. Resonating constitutes the basis of strengths based practice everyone has strengths. We have experiences, abilities and knowledge that assist us in our lives. If we are lucky, we also have a variety of people around us who act as a support network for us. A Strengths based Approach allows people to identify

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and build on their strengths so that they can reach their goals, and retain or regain independence in their daily lives. Why work in this way? Long-term studies in strengthbased care have proven that the approach improves self-care abilities, confidence, and self-esteem of clients allowing them to independently carry out daily living activities.

The Strengths Approach

A strengths based approach operates on the assumption that people have strengths and resources for their own empowerment. Traditional teaching and professional development models concentrate on deficit based approaches, ignoring the strengths and experiences of the participants. In strengths based approach the focus is on the individual not the content. Drawing on appreciative inquiry, strengths based methodologies do not ignore problems. Instead they shift the frame of reference to define the issues. By focusing on what is working well, informed successful strategies support the adaptive growth of organisations and individuals. A belief and an approach that every individual, group, organisation and community has strengths allows us to focuses on identifying, mobilizing, and honouring the resources, assets, wisdom, and knowledge that every person, family, group, or community has. This processes of re-discovery with the community or individuals helps, assists in healing and ensuring that their full potential is brought out for creating meaningful patterns that can see as being useful. An opportunity there fore is offered to fathom their inner strengths. The Strengths Perspective recognises that for the most part of life, people face adversity, become resilient and resourceful and learn new strategies to overcome adversity. It would be pertinent to consider resilience in the context of strengths perspective `as the opportunity and capacity of individuals to navigate their way to psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that may pull together during crisis and provide them an opportunity and capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for life following adversity in appropriate and culturally meaningful ways' (Pulla, V., 2012). Thus using client's personal strengths and in discovering resources in the environments to fulfil the client's needs and to enhance the client's resilience (Norman, 2000). In fact the environment is conceptualises as "the helping environment", in a strengths based practice (Early and GlenMaye, 2004, p. 113).

As a practitioner and facilitator of strengths approach, people told me that at times their negative experiences bring them down, at the same time I saw as the process work commences people recognise that even in their most adverse situation they have displayed their strengths.

The emphasis is certainly on `getting up' to see opportunities to growth and development. It would be na?ve to think that a strengths perspective allows social workers to casually taciturn the real pains and troubles that affect our clients and our societies. It is widely acknwedged that poverty, child sexual abuse, and violence

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Papers in Strength Based Practice

towards elderly, torture and racism all these are `real problems' and they exist. Saleebey articulated the central belief systems that strengths perspective entails in his first published article on `Power in the People: Strengths and Hope, in the year 2000 as follows:

`The strengths perspective does not require one to discount the grip and thrall of addictions or the humiliating, frightening anguish of child abuse, or the unbidden disorganization and confusion of psychosis. But from the vantage point of a strengths perspective, it is as wrong to deny the possible just as it is to deny the problem. And the strengths perspective does decry the intemperate reign of psychopathology and illness as the central civic, moral, and medical categorical imperative. Adherents of the strengths perspective do not believe, with good reason, that most people who are the victims of abuse or their own rampant appetites, or that all people who have been traumatized inevitably become damaged goods' (Saleebey, 2000).

Clearly we are unaware of the upper limits of human capacity to grow and change, therefore the message is to take the individual, group, and community aspirations seriously. Strengths Approach allows us as human service workers to go beyond the assessment, diagnosis, or profiling and presenting verdicts on people's lives. If we aim social work to be a profession that work with people to build their hopes, values, aspirations, and visions, then strengths approach obviously lets us deal with all those possibilities through a collaborative pathway. For this to happen we need to be open to the idea that our clients do have the wisdom, knowledge, and experience that they bring with them and that in combination with the specialized skills and experience that the facilitator may have a valuable outcome can be created. This could not happen if the end user voice is not heard and valued at all levels of management of change.

Some Common Myths about Strengths-Based Practice

? It is just a glorified version of positive thinking. ? It's really about reframing people's perception to find good even in the worst

situation. ? It basically re-labels weaknesses as strengths. ? It ignores the reality that serious symptoms and problems do exist and continue

to persist. ? Strengths-Based Practice assesses the inherent strengths of a client's people

employees or family, and then builds on them.

Why Use It?

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It is an empowering alternative to traditional human resource development methodologies that tend towards describing or diagnosing human motivation and human competencies functioning in terms of deficits and may offer un-related alternatives. Strengths approach avoids the use of stigmatising terminology, which people in need may have gotten used to and eventually accept, and feel helpless to change and contribute their future. It fosters hope within people by focusing on what is or has been historically successful for them in their personal, professional and or even career contexts, thereby exposing precedent successes as the groundwork for realistic expectations. It inventories the positive building blocks that already exist in the environment of the changer seeker which can serve as the foundation for future growth and change for him or her self and it reduces the power and authority barriers in number of situations such as employees and their managers or the clients and their therapists, the communities and the social worker by,

? Promoting the client to the level of expert in regards to what has worked, what does not work, and what might work in their personal, professional and work group situation.

? Placing anyone in power or expertise in the role of facilitator, partner or guide. ? And lastly--it works (Pulla, V., 2006).

Empowerment, Ecosystem, and the Strengths Based Practices

The strengths perspective originated in response to criticism of the deficit-oriented psychotherapeutic model that dominated social work practice (Guo and Tsui, 2010; Saleebey, 1992). Different strengths based approaches to practice emerged in late 1980s as alternatives to the dominant models. The impetus for strengths based social work practice arrived at a time in US when helping professions were saturated with psychosocial approaches based on individual, family, and community pathology, deficits, problems, abnormality, victimization, and disorder (Saleebey, 1996, p.296). The strengths perspective is rooted in ecosystem and empowerment theories with underpinnings of humanistic philosophy. According to Johnson (1998), ecosystem theory provided a foundation for the integrated, generalist social work practice model and revived the core concept of `person-in-environment' or "how people and their environments fit" (Miley, O'Melia, and DuBois, 2004, p. 33). In fact, Weick and colleagues (1989), in a seminal article about the strengths perspective, stated that "the personal history and unique composite of personality characteristics of individuals interacts constantly with the political, economic, social, and natural forces in society (Weick, Rapp, Sullivan, and Kisthardt, 1989, p. 353). Because of their affinities, the combination of strengths based practices and new ecosystem approaches is increasingly being used in social work practice. Therefore, Guo and Tsui (2010) advocate for the adoption of a reflective practice model that creates "a

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